"Lato, that off horse is spavined."
"For heaven's sake don't notice it! My mother-in-law bought the pair privately to surprise me. She paid five thousand guilders for them."
"H'm! Who persuaded her to buy them?"
"Pistasch Kamenz. I do not grudge him his bargain," murmurs Lato, adding, with a shake of the head, "'Tis odd, dogs and horses are the only things in which we have the advantage over the financiers."
With which he takes his friend's arm and crosses the square to the Casino.
[CHAPTER XI.]
AN OLD FRIEND.
They are sitting in the farthest corner of the smoky dining-hall of the Casino, Harry and his friend, by a window that looks out upon a little yard. Harry is smoking a cigar, and sits astride of a chair; Lato contrives to sprawl over three chairs, and smokes cigarettes, using about five matches to each cigarette. Two glasses, a siphon, and a bottle of cognac stand upon a rickety table close by.
The room is low, the ceiling is almost black, and the atmosphere suggests old cheese and stale cigar-smoke. Between the frames of their Imperial Majesties a fat spider squats in a large gray web. At a table not far from the two friends a cadet, too thin for his uniform, is writing a letter, while a lieutenant opposite him is occupied in cutting the initials of his latest flame, with his English penknife, on the green-painted table. Before a Bohemian glass mirror in a glass frame stands another lieutenant, with a thick beard and a bald pate, which last he is endeavouring artistically to conceal by brushing over it the long thick hair at the back of his neck. His name is Spreil; he has lately been transferred to the hussars from the infantry, and he is the butt for every poor jest in the regiment.
"I cannot tell you how glad I am to see you," Treurenberg repeats to his friend. As he speaks, his cigarette goes out; he scrapes his twenty-fourth match in the last quarter of an hour, and breaks off its head.